Biography

My first degree was in Classics at University College London, where I also studied Sanskrit and Comparative Philology with Paddy Considine. After working in publishing (Pergamon Press; Oxford University Press, OUP), I went to Oxford University and took the MPhil in Comparative Philology and General Linguistics (1991), and then a DPhil (1996) in historical phonology. My work was the first to apply contemporary phonetic theory to a set of sound changes reconstructed from Proto-Indo-European into the ancient languages of Italy (Phonetics and Philology, OUP 2004). During my MPhil, I was introduced to Experimental Phonetics and Sociolinguistics, especially Language Variation and Change, and I shifted my research focus to observing sound change in progress and understanding how sounds convey and reflect social meaning. This perspective was broadened by my work as an ESRC Research Fellow on a psycholinguistic research project on bilingualism and literacy acquisition in young Panjabi-English speaking-children, at the School of Education at the University of Birmingham (1996).

In 1997 I moved to north to Glasgow, where - with Mike MacMahon, Rachel Smith, and our postdocs and research students - I established the lively research group at the Glasgow University Laboratory of Phonetics (GULP). A highlight for us all was hosting the 18th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, ICPhS 2015, at the SECC, in Glasgow (10-14 August 2015), with our Scottish phonetics colleagues from the Universities of Edinburgh, Strathclyde and Queen Margaret University Edinburgh, which encouraged over a thousand of the world's phoneticians to come to Scotland for a stimulating and enjoyable conference.

My research considers the many relationships between speech and society, including:

sound change: to date I have managed three exernally-funded projects on sound change, focussing on Glaswegian vernacular, moving from an apparent-time, variationist sociolinguistic study, Accent Change in Glaswegian(1999), to my current research on real-time change over the course of the 20th century (How stable is the standard? Carnegie Trust, 2015; Sounds of the City Leverhulme Trust, 2011-14). My latest project, Speech Across Dialects of English, exploits technological advances to expand the scope to phonetic variation and change in Old and New World English over the 20th century, with colleagues Morgan Sonderegger (McGill), Jeff Mielke, Erik Thomas, Robin Dodsworth, Paul Fyfe (North Carolina State), Tyler Kendall (Oregon), and Joe Fruehwald (Edinburgh). I am fortunate to collaborate with many colleagues on my work on sound change, including: Brian Jose (Indiana State University), Ludger Evers (Glasgow: Mathematics and Statistics), Rachel Macdonald (Glasgow), Robert Lennon (Glasgow), Teresa Neocleous (Glasgow: Mathematics and Statistics), Tamara Rathcke (Kent), Claire Timmins (Strathclyde), Duncan Robertson (York, UK), Morgan Sonderegger (McGill), Marton Soskuthy (York, UK). A recent extension of this work has been to consider aspects of Scottish English in the input of early New Zealand English, with Lynn Clark, Jen Hay, and Kevin Watson (Christ Church, NZ).

influence of the broadcast media on language change: This research strand developed from my first Glasgow project in 1999, and led to my ESRC-funded project,Is television a contributory factor in accent change in adolescents? (2002-5), which was the first systematic investigation of the impact of watching TV on speech.I continue to collaborate with Claire Timmins (Strathclyde) and Ichiro Ota (Kagoshima) on this research. Understanding how speakers parse speech without the possibility of interaction led to the collaborative PhD project carried out by Vijay Solanki, Brains in Dialogue, with Alessandro Vinciarelli, Rachel Smith, Pascal Belin and Guillaume Rousselet.

2006: Royal Society of Edinburgh: Caledonian Research Fellowship/Royal Society of Edinburgh Visiting Scholars Fellowship: research visit to Hannover FreieUniversitaet, September – December 2006: £3600.

Supervision

I supervise postgraduate students at doctoral and masters levels in phonetics, sociophonetics, and sociolinguistics, and currently have 100% completion rate for my PhD students. The majority of my PhD students are now have posts in academia. I welcome applications from students keen to work in these areas. Postgraduate students working with me enjoy excellent facilities in the Glasgow University Laboratory of Phonetics, with many opportunities for meeting visiting scholars and speakers.

Current PhD students

Florent Chevalier (2017-), Speaker dynamics as a mechanism of sound change: A real-time study of speech accommodation and sound change in Glaswegian (with Sylvie Hanote, University of Poitiers)

Duncan Robertson (2011-15), Implicit sociolingustic cognition, ESRC (lead with Rachel Smith, Christoph Scheepers [Psychology]). Duncan is now working as a postdoc on the TUULS project at the University of York.

Claire Nance (2009-2013), Transmission of Scottish Gaelic in the modern world, Lord Kelvin / Adam Smith Scholarship Scheme (joint with Robby O’Maolalaigh [Celtic and Scottish Gaelic], Andrew Smith [Sociology]). Claire now has a permanent Lectureship at the University of Lancaster.

Cassie Smith-Christmas (2008-12), Code-switching and language maintenance in a Gaelic-speaking family in Skye (with Robby O’Maolalaigh [Celtic and Scottish Gaelic). Cassie has just gained a Lectureship at the University of Limerick, after working as a researcher at the University of the Highlands and Islands.

Ellen Bramwell (2006-2012), Naming in Society: A cross-cultural study of five communities in Scotland, ESRC. Ellen has just completed her second postdoc on the Metaphor in the Curriculum project at the University of Glasgow.

Robert Lawson (2005-9), Sociolinguistic constructions of identity among adolescent males in Glasgow, ESRC. Robert now has a permanent lectureship at the Birmingham City University.

Suzy Orr (2003-7), ‘Hanging on the Telephone’ A Sociophonetic Study of Speech in a Glaswegian Call Centre, ESRC. Suzy is now the E-Learning Development Manager for Law at the University of Glasgow.

October 2006: I co-taught a bilingual German/English University course on the impact of the media on language change with Jannis Androutsopoulos, at Leibnitz University Hannover.

Additional Information

Commissions of Trust

Elected Member of the Council for the International Phonetic Association (2015-19)

Vice President of the Permanent Council for the Organisation of ICPhS

Elected President of the British Academic Association of Phoneticians (2014-)

Member of REF2014 Panel D, 28: Modern Languages and Linguistics

Commonwealth Scholarships Commission (2014-)

Re-elected as a member of the AHRC Virtual College (2012-)

AHRC Virtual College (2006-12)

AHRC Grants Board for Modern Languages and Linguistics (June 2010)

ESRC First Grants Board (2007, 2008, 2009)

ESRC Virtual College for Management, Psychology, Linguistics and Education (2002-2005)

I review grant bids for the following funding bodies: Arts and Humanities Research Council, Belgian Research Council, British Academy, Canadian Research Council, the Carnegie Trust, Centre National de le Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), Economic and Social Research Council (also Rapporteur), Leverhulme Trust, Marsden Research Scheme (New Zealand), National Science Foundation, Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research; South African Research Council.

I have acted as Tenure Track Assessor for: Chicago University; Ohio State University; Stanford University; University of Trondheim

I am often asked to review journal articles and book proposals for: Cambridge University Press, Clinical Linguistics and Phonetics, English Language and Linguistics, Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, Journal of the International Phonetic Association, Journal of Phonetics, Journal of Sociolinguistics, Laboratory Phonology, Language and Society, Language Variation and Change, Oxford University Press, Phonetica

Journal Editorial Boards

2010-: Journal of the International PhonExteretic Association

2014-: Language in Society

Conference Organization

2010-2015: Chair of the Local Organizing Committee for the 18th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences - ICPhS 2015, hosted by a Scottish Consortium of four universities (Edinburgh, Glasgow, Strathclyde and Queen Margaret University Edinburgh), held at the SECC, Glasgow, 10-14 August 2015 (1006 delegates).

External Examining

Taught Courses

MA in Sociolinguistics, Sociolinguistics of the Arab World, University of Essex, 2014-

MA in Phonetics, University College London, 2010-2013.

MA in Language, History and Society, University of Sheffield, 2009-13.

BA in Linguistics/English Language, Department of Linguistics and English Language, University of Manchester, 2008-10.

MA in English Language, Department of English Language, University of Edinburgh, 2005-9.

MA in Phonetics, Department of Linguistics and Phonetics, University of Leeds, 2004-7.

PhD

iPhD in Phonetics and Phonology, University of Newcastle (February 2016-)

The role of social factors in bilingual speech processing: The case of Galician New Speakers, Gise Tome Lourido, University College London, 7 October 2017

Sound change and social meaning: The perception and production of phonetic change in York, Daniel Lawrence, University of Edinburgh, 13 September 2017

Regional variation and innovation in Punjabi-accented English Jess Wormald, University of York, 12 April 2016

‘Through the looking glass: Changing perspectives on gender and the /s S/ contrast in Glasgow’, Innovative Methods in Sociophonetics II, Satellite workshop to Fourth Workshop on Sound Change, University of Edinburgh, 19 April 2017

‘A tale of one city: A sociophonetic study of 100+ years of Glaswegian vernacular’, Colloquium Series, Linguistics Department, University of Michigan, 24 March 2017.

‘Reaping the rewards: Insights from doing sociophonetic research across the recorded history of an urban dialect’, Doing Sociophonetic Research, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, 8-10 February 2017.

'A tale of one city: A sociophonetic study of 100+ years of Glaswegian vernacular’, English-speaking towns/cities: memoirs and narratives,Université Jean Monnet, St Étienne 20-21 October 2016.

‘Speech on Safari’, Experimental Approaches to the Perception and Production of Language Variation (ExAPP 2016), University of Vienna, 21-24 September 2016.

‘Twa son, some soldiers, and a city: An investigation of real-time change in Scottish English’, Australasian Speech Science Technology Association Conference, New Zealand Institute for Language Brain and Behaviour, 3-5 December 2014.

‘Bridging the gap: The role of style in language change linked to the broadcast media’, Roundtable on ‘Language, Style and Broadcast Media’, Copenhagen University, 12-13 June 2014.

‘Social Factors and Sound Change’, Third Workshop on Sound Change, University of California at Berkeley, May 2014.

‘No longer an elephant in the room...: The influence of the media on sound change’, International Conference on Spoken English: theme: Spoken English and the Media, University Université Paris 13 - Sorbonne Paris Cité, 4-5 April 2014.

‘Sounds without borders/Sons sans frontiers: exploring sociophonetic variation in Scottish English’, Colloque International de Jeunes Chercheurs en Linguistique/International Conference of Young Researchers in Linguistics, University of Strasbourg France, 6-8 June 2012.

‘Theory, method and practice: exploring the relationship between spoken language in the media and speech change in society’, Japan Dialect Levelling Project Meeting, National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics, Tachikawa, Tokyo, 8-9 December 2011.

‘Sound change and the influence of the television’, Distinguished Visiting Speaker, Department of Linguistics, Ohio State University, 6 May 2011.

‘To interact or not to interact: a challenging question for sociophonetics’, Variation in Language Processing, University of Chester, 13-15 April 2011 [cancelled because of illness].

‘Working with sociophonetic data: A case study from Scottish English’, Problems and Possibilities in Sociophonetics, University of Sheffield, 16 March 2011.

‘Derhoticisation in Scottish English – the story so far’, Sociophonetics – at the crossroads of speech variation, processing and communication, Scuola Normale Superiore, University of Pisa, 14-15 December 2010.

‘News from the North: Some sociophonetic data from Scottish English and their implications for phonology’, PAC Workshop, Montpellier, 13-14 September 2010.

‘Investigating the role of TV in accent change: TH-fronting in Glaswegian’, MA Seminar, Outline of a history of the Danish speech community, 1999-2000, Department of Nordic Studies and Linguistics and Department of Scandinavian Studies, University of Copenhagen, 3 October 2006.

(with C. Timmins, G. Pryce) ‘Bart Simpson lives in York and speaks Glaswegian: Accents, attitudes and imitation in Glaswegian adolescents’, Research Seminar, Department of Language and Linguistic Science, University of York, 24 May 2005.

(with C. Timmins, G. Pryce) ‘Investigating the effects of television on change in urban accents:The story so far’, Research Seminar, Department of Linguistics and English Language, University of Lancaster, 15 March 2005.

(with C. Timmins) ‘Investigating the role of television as a factor in language change’, Research Seminar, FachbereichLiteratur- und Sprachwissenschaft, University of Hannover, 16 November 2004.

(with C. Timmins) ‘Analysing the language of television: The case of media-Cockney’, Paper presented as part of Seminar für Medienlinguistik, University of Hannover, 15 November 2004.

(with C. Timmins) ‘Investigating the effects of mobility on language variation and change’, Research Seminar, Department of Language and Linguistics, University of Essex, 4 November 2004.

‘Complex consonants: interpreting phonological variation and change in Glaswegian’, Linguistics and Phonetics Seminar, University of Leeds, 16 March 2004.

'Talkin' Jockney': variation and change in Glaswegian’, Linguistics Seminar, University of Aberdeen, 9 March 2004.

‘Sabellian phonology’, Cambridge Italic seminar, 18 February 2004.

‘Changing consonants: insights from a contemporary spoken corpus’, The Philological Society, University of Manchester, 21 November 2003.

1998

Martin, D., Stuart-Smith, J. and Dhesi, K.K.
(1998)
Insiders and outsiders: translating in a bilingual research project.
In: Hunston, S. (ed.)
Language at Work: Selected Papers from the Annual Meeting of the British Association for Applied Linguistics Held at the University of Birmingham, September 1997.
Series: British studies in applied linguistics (13).
British Association for Applied Linguistics: Clevedon, UK, pp. 109-122.
ISBN 9781853594274

Martin, D., Stuart-Smith, J. and Dhesi, K.K.
(1998)
Insiders and outsiders: translating in a bilingual research project.
In: Hunston, S. (ed.)
Language at Work: Selected Papers from the Annual Meeting of the British Association for Applied Linguistics Held at the University of Birmingham, September 1997.
Series: British studies in applied linguistics (13).
British Association for Applied Linguistics: Clevedon, UK, pp. 109-122.
ISBN 9781853594274